


Jellyfish

by Living_Underground



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, I really want to know what the guy in the aisle seat was thinking, IVF arc, Mulder tries to convince her not to, Post-Episode: s06e13 Agua Mala, Scully wants to give up, they have an in depth convo on the plane ride home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24497593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Living_Underground/pseuds/Living_Underground
Summary: A little post-Agua Mala chat. Just a reprieve from all the tension that is floating around at the time. I mean, there's still a bit of angst there, but it's not...it's just... oh, just read it. I can't do summaries.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 2
Kudos: 37





	Jellyfish

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact, my laptop deleted this four times, only saving backups at one certain point in the writing process and corrupting all the files past that. Which is why I am posting it now because I do not have the energy to rewrite it again. So it is unedited and rough around the edges, but...eh. All my writing is unedited and rough around the edges. 
> 
> Second fun fact, every time I have sat down to work on this I have been eating fried rice. I don't know why. But the only time I can work on it is when I am eating fried rice. My brain is a strange and mysterious thing.

They’d been trying for over a year. Or… _she’d_ been trying, with his…assistance? They didn’t talk about it much. Just commenting on doctor’s appointments and schedules. They never discussed the actual personal elements. That was beyond them. He was helping her out, as a friend, helping her get what she wanted, or at least try to get what she wanted.

He knew what he wanted, of course, he did. _He_ wanted to be involved. _He_ wanted to be there for her more than a friend, more than a donor.

But that wasn’t what she wanted, otherwise, she would have said, right?

And so there he was; friend, donor, nothing more, nothing less.

He tried, though. He’d leave Snickers bars on her desk, cool from the vending machine, on the days she came in with red eyes and sat with more discomfort than usual, despondency leeching from her as she subtly pressed the heel of her hand into the side of her lower abdomen, trying to ease away physical and emotional pain. He had a hot water bottle that never left his away-bag, tucked next to a box of tissues (the soft ones he knew didn’t scratch her eyes as the thin motel ones did), that he would leave on the standard rickety table of whichever crappy motel they were in that week if she had seemed quieter on her return from the bathroom than normal, silently drowning in her monthly proof of her body’s failure.

A wedge had been driven between them that he didn’t know how to remove, an insidious splinter stuck just below the skin of them, a wound that pulled like shrapnel at each and every wrong step, just enough to remind them that it was still there, a scar that would never quite heal properly. They were tangled amongst the tentacles of a jellyfish, pressed together so close, but any movement, even just a murmur, and one or the other of them would be stung. And through it all, she had still been undergoing treatment. He could see the toll it was taking, wearing her down. It was something she was keeping quiet, private; nobody needed to know her struggle but the two of them. Not her mother, not Skinner. Nobody. He was the only one other than her doctors who knew the mountain she was climbing, and even he was not privy to the nights of tears, the hopeful feeling after an appointment that would end in hopelessness. He wasn’t there for the evenings she spent praying, and then researching, and then praying again; flitting between religion and science, the two institutions she sought solace in.

He wasn’t there the nights she wished she could just curl up in his embrace, just have someone else to go through this with, have _him_ to go through this with. Just have someone there to love her and feel her pain with her.

Occasionally they’d be working a case and have a witness to interview, a mother with a baby, and she would always sit prim and proper on the loveseat or the kitchen chair, smiling a tight smile, asking all the right questions and keeping her eyes averted from the grinning portraits on the walls. But then the baby would cry, or the toddler would wobble through, and her gaze would snap to the little human that she couldn’t have, her eyes would glaze over, and he knew, as he took over the interview, that she was imagining tufts of red hair and clear blue eyes, chubby little cheeks scattered with freckles and a grin to light the room up.

He imagined it too.

And then Florida. Florida, where she was already tense enough, having been dragged out on what seemed like a fool’s errand in the middle of a hurricane. Florida, where he got them trapped in an apartment complex, no power, no fresh water, and presented her with the task of delivering a baby, then abandoning her.

That jellyfish, with its tentacles constricting around them, left welts that would heal on the surface, but scars that would be there permanently on the mind and soul.

She’d been quiet on the way back to Arthur Dales’ place, even quieter than she had been lately. A nod to him to go in to run through what had happened with Dales whilst she called the hospital to check up on everyone. He understood. She needed a moment alone, just a minute to compose herself.

She was staring out of the plane window, watching the clouds, when he decided to broach the subject. ‘You wanna talk about it?’

‘Not really,’ she sighed, looking down to her lap with a frown and picking at her nails. He was about to nod, say okay when she opened her mouth again. ‘I just don’t think it’s fair, is all. In the time we…since I’ve…’ her brow furrowed as she tried phrasings out, ‘in the last year, Mulder, over one hundred and thirty million babies have been born. One hundred and thirty million. And not one of them…’ she tilted her face up to the ceiling, working her jaw, swallowing tightly as she blinked back angry tears that she would not allow to fall.

He nodded, remaining silent. She would ask for his input if she wanted it. The guy on the other side of him - who had blatantly refused to swap for the window seat with Scully so that Mulder could get the aisle seat, but was courteous enough to fold his legs further into the aisle to give Mulder more room for his spider legs - had read over the same page in his book three times in the silence. Waiting for the next murmur of conversation. Mulder was of half a mind to ask him if he'd specifically requested front row tickets to someone else's personal crises, but figured that would offend Scully more than it would make his point. 

‘I’ve been thinking of stopping trying, I guess I figure if it were going to happen, it would have done already. I mean, we knew going in that the chances were slim, but I hoped-‘ she broke off with a shrug, her lips trembling in a sad little pout.

‘You still have more attempts, though, right?’ She’d shown him the maths, back in the beginning, shown him a timeline she had put together with her doctors, a schedule of treatments spanning two years. He’d photocopied it, tucked it away in his drawer.

A small nod and another shrug. ‘What’s the point, though? It’s not going to happen, Mulder, it’s clearly not what life has planned for me. Babies and houses and husbands are just something other people get.’

‘I don’t believe that. I don’t. There’s always adoption?’

‘Mulder…’ she looked at him scathingly, ‘they didn’t let me adopt my own daughter, given my work, and my history, I’d never even be considered.’

‘Okay, what about surrogacy? Or looking at egg donors. I don’t think you should give up all hope yet, Scully.’

‘I…just don’t understand what I did wrong with my life.’ She sighed and shook her head, focusing out of the window. ‘It all seems so hard. It shouldn’t be this hard, right?’

He covered her hand with his larger one, rubbing his thumb along her soft skin. ‘No, it shouldn’t, but it is, and that’s okay. We’ll get through it,’ her gaze flicked up to him. ‘I mean, you’ll get through it. You’ll get there. You’re strong.’

She turned her hand over in his, lacing their fingers together, ‘thank you, Mulder.’

‘No problem. What are friends for, hey?’

‘No, I meant…thank you, for…everything.’

A small twitch of a smile, half a shrug, ‘what are friends for.’

She smiled at him, properly smiled for the first time in…weeks maybe, before settling her head on his shoulder, their hands still locked. Somewhere, a jellyfish loosened its grip on its prey.

‘Just promise me something, Scully?’

‘Hmm?’

He swallowed, his voice cracking as he spoke, ‘just keep trying, keep going with the IVF. Just…just until your attempts run out. And you can start looking at other options whilst still doing the treatments. Never give up on a miracle, hey?’ It had become his motto of sorts. Said more to himself than to her, but if ever she was having doubts he would murmur it into her hair, or drop it into the conversation. He wasn’t sure if either of them actually believed in miracles, but they both wanted to. This miracle, at least.

‘Why, Mulder?’

He wasn’t going to tell her that it was because he had spent the past year and a bit imagining a little girl running around with tufts of red hair and clear blue eyes, a pouty bottom lip and, heaven forbid, his nose. He certainly wasn’t going to tell her that he had been imagining this little girl for _much more_ than a year and a bit. ‘Because one day, Scully, you’re going to be an amazing mom, and for that to happen you have to explore every avenue available, right to the very end. That’s just the way this thing works, you can’t give up right before the finish line. And if that means you need some help, well, you’ve got it, ‘cause I’m not leaving your side ‘til you’re holding your little baby in your arms, or until you send me away. Got it?’ His voice had taken on the soft, whispered quality of a bedtime story, which must have been why, when he turned his head for her response he instead found her eyes shut and her mouth open, drooling slightly as she slept. She could sleep anywhere, his Scully could.

Either that or his professions of love in not so many words were so boring that they put her to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I have always had a headcanon that Mulder said 'never give up on a miracle' several times throughout the IVF arc, not just that one time we saw after her last IVF attempt. I also headcanon that Scully would not tell anyone, not even her mother. If she told her mother, Maggie would not have been so in the dark on all of the things she was keeping 'secret' about her pregnancy, as she says in...whichever episode it is with the baby shower. IDK, I don't watch season 8 or 9 really.


End file.
